A top State Department spokesman on Thursday boasted that his department is open and transparent, but could hardly finish the sentence before erupting in laughter.

“Welcome to the State Department,” spokesman Mark Toner said. “I think we have some interns in the back. Welcome. Good to see you in this exercise in transparency and democracy.”

Toner then burst out laughing at his own comments as reporters in the room laughed with him.

Why is that so funny? Because the notion of transparency for the Obama administration has indeed been a joke.

The Washington Post even called out the Obama administration for keeping “the news media — and therefore the public — in the dark far too much over the past 7 1/2 years.”

“After early promises to be the most transparent administration in history, this has been one of the most secretive. And in certain ways, one of the most elusive. It’s also been one of the most punitive toward whistleblowers and leakers who want to bring light to wrongdoing they have observed from inside powerful institutions.”

Forbes has an excellent report on how the President and his administration have actively worked to conceal important information from the public.

Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee offered the best retort to Toner’s assertion that State Department press briefings are an “exercise in transparency and democracy.”

“Is that what it is?” he asked. “I thought it was an exercise in spin and obfuscation.”

About the AuthorRusty Weiss

Rusty Weiss is a freelance journalist focusing on the conservative movement and its political agenda. He has been writing conservatively charged articles for several years in the upstate New York area, and his writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, American Thinker, FoxNews.com, Big Government, the Times Union, and the Troy Record. He is also Editor of one of the top conservative blogs of 2012, the Mental Recession.